Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like The Last Summer:
Voicemails for Isabelle
Netflix’s track record with romantic comedies has been a bit rough over the last decade, to put it mildly. More often than not, they feel cheaply assembled, half-written, or filmed entirely in front of green screens and sound stages that never quite convince you anyone actually occupied the same room together. It’s gotten to the point where I find myself skipping most of them unless they’ve either been recommended by multiple people I trust or have performers and filmmakers attached that I already enjoy. Voicemails for Isabelle lands in the latter category.
Eternity
Eternity has a sweet, sentimental charm that fits David Freyne’s A24 rom-com mold, then asks a clever what-if of the afterlife. When you die, you enter a hub and choose where to spend forever. For Joan, played by Elizabeth Olsen, the question is less where than who. Freyne, working from a script co-written with Pat Cunnane, leans into humor and physical business rather than plumbing for deeper grief. The emotion largely comes from familiar highlight reels, meet cutes and proposal flashbacks that remind Joan what each love felt like in its best light. When the movie wants to go big, it does not hesitate.
Carolina Caroline
Shoutout to Adam Rehmeier. At a time when many discussions about movies seems to eventually circle back to someone declaring that “they don’t make them like they used to,” Rehmeier continues quietly proving otherwise. His films aren’t built around massive budgets, franchise potential, or elaborate visual effects. They’re star vehicles in the purest sense of the term: modestly scaled stories that know exactly what lane they’re occupying and squeeze every ounce of value out of charismatic performers.
Mile End Kicks
This generation’s closest thing to Almost Famous, and honestly, more coming-of-age movies in the vein of Cameron Crowe or Richard Linklater or even contemporaries like Cooper Raiff or Greta Gerwig, I’m all in for. The screenplay, which started life under the working title Anglophone as the winner of a competition for emerging women screenwriters back in 2016, is based in part on Chandler Levack’s own early adulthood before becoming a professional music critic and filmmaker. That autobiographical grounding should give the film the kind of lived-in specificity that separates the great hangout movies from the good ones.
Preparation for the Next Life
Bing Liu’s Preparation for the Next Life is a patient, unvarnished drama about two people trying to build a life together with nothing to fall back on. After the nonfiction clarity of Minding the Gap, Liu shifts to narrative without losing the documentary instincts that made his debut so piercing. You feel that in the way the camera lingers on kitchens in Chinatown, cramped rooms, and the small rituals of work and survival. The story is familiar, yet the texture is specific.
You, Me & Tuscany
Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page are both perfectly likable on their own. Bailey continues to be an incredibly empathetic screen presence, making Anna easy to root for even when the script isn’t giving her much to work with. Page remains effortlessly charismatic and underspoken, although I’ve increasingly found him more compelling playing charming antagonists, like he did in Black Bag, than straightforward romantic leads. The issue isn’t either performance individually. It’s that the movie never gives them enough meaningful scenes together to convince you they belong with one another. Chemistry isn’t something you can simply assume because two attractive actors occupy the same frame, and You, Me & Tuscany spends surprisingly little time actually building that relationship.
The People We Meet on Vacation
Netflix has built a steady assembly line of soft rom-coms over the past few years, and People We Meet on Vacation fits the template almost too cleanly. It is an adaptation of Emily Henry’s novel, glossy and travel-poster pretty, with luxurious vacation spots doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Brett Haley has made sweeter, more grounded work in Hearts Beat Loud and All the Bright Places, but this one feels Netflix-ified into something airless and mechanical, like it is engineered to be left on in the background rather than actually watched.
Song Sung Blue
Song Sung Blue feels like the platonic ideal of a holiday release, for better and for worse. It goes down easy, it wants to comfort you when you are feeling low, and it never risks getting too sharp or strange. If you are in the market for a warm, crowd-pleasing musical drama built around familiar songs, Craig Brewer gives you exactly that. If you are looking for anything with bite, surprise, or a point of view that cuts deeper than its own inspirational messaging, Song Sung Blue mostly plays like polite background noise dressed up as uplift.
Fly Me to the Moon
Rumor has it that Apple is stepping away from theatrical releases for their original movies, and the lukewarm reception of Greg Berlanti‘s Fly Me to the Moon may be a big reason why. Starring Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson, this romantic comedy set against the backdrop of the U.S.-Soviet space race seemed poised for success. It had all the ingredients for a financial hit: big stars, a pastiche-heavy style, and the kind of premise that could benefit from strong word-of-mouth. Yet, it never gained traction.
Regretting You
Regretting You is the latest Colleen Hoover adaptation to arrive with a lot of built-in melodrama and almost no ability to make that melodrama feel earned. After the infamous chaos surrounding It Ends With Us, I hoped this would at least land as a clean, competent tearjerker. Instead it plays limp and strangely confusing, a movie that keeps insisting it is devastating without ever giving the relationships enough shape for the devastation to hit.
READ MORE: Movies Like Eternity, Movies Like Carolina Caroline
